Khushboo Welfare Society

Project Brief: Khushboo Welfare Society- A center for children with mental and multiple disabilities, provides special education, vocational training, therapeutic assistance, and early intervention programs. Project Type: Children with Disabilities (description) Primary Focus: children with disabilities (description)

Khushboo Welfare Society has four main divisions : Sparsh (early intervention program for children from 0-6 years), Blessings (the school for children from 6-15 years), Samarth (vocational training program for adolescents and adults from 15-30+ years), and Samvedan (for children with profound disabilities). Currently, they have a student: teacher ratio of 10: 1 with an assistant in a classroom for mixed group of children with different disabilities. Further, the ratio is 5: 1 for children with severe and profound mental disabilities with a committed attendant for looking after feeding and toilet needs of children with disabilities. The teachers have degrees/diploma/training in special education, and have years of experience. Khushboo Welfare Society recently underwent a significant infrastructure expansion, that lead to addition of more classrooms for therapy and arts. Their new initiatives program include imparting lessons in arts, music, dance, yoga and computers, while integrating therapy into the main school curriculum. Therapy includes occupational therapy, speech therapy, physiotherapy and clay therapy. It is seen that the children enjoy all of these new activities which are highly therapeutic in nature. This year, Khushboo plans to open a state-of-the-art Audiometry lab. Khushboo also works closely with the leading hospitals in the Gurgaon region to provide their beneficiaries access to health care.They have helped obtain the health insurance and disability certificate for most of their beneficiaries. They conduct medical camps regularly on their campus for their students.They are also engaged in community based rehabilitation programs, for children with multiple disabilities in communities who do not have accessibility to the direct services of Khushboo. Asha-Austin supports ~70% of the salaries associated with these new initiatives staff, and is about ~10% of Khushboo’s operational needs. Asha-Austin, knowing as to how important, it is for an organization to retain its dedicated staff, especially teachers, decided to fund this project towards remuneration of salaries.

To provide early intervention to children who are mentally challenged. To identify the educational needs of such children To impart relevant training to beneficiaries to make them self reliant To promote individual abilities for rehabilitation and vocational training To educate the parents, caregivers and community members on various aspects of mental retardation and means of coping with a mentally challenged child at home To aid integration of such children within the community To provide spiritual support to concerned families To aid legal interest of such persons

In India's map, Gurgaon is one of the most progressive cities in the National Capital Region in the periphery of Delhi. However, there has been an evident lack of specialized services, in the region, especially for persons with mental and multiple disabilities. Moreover, a daily commute to New Delhi, from Gurgaon, for these differently-abled children, is neither pragmatic nor conducive to their environment. About 12 years back, this core problem was identified by a few spirited individuals who were touched by such crisis in some form or the other. They came together to provide a professionally equipped facility for care, development and education, for children with mental and multiple disabilities, in particular for those with acute impairment within Gurgaon.

Pioneers in Gurgaon, Khushboo Welfare Society caters to all segments of the society be it poor or rich with quality services. Though today there are other similar private centers or regular schools with special wings, Khushboo still remains the only centre which provides multiple services (both therapeutic and educational / vocational) to cater to all kinds of patients and students. Regular schools with special wings take mostly 'trainable' children while most of Khushboo children are severely challenged. Khushboo is also well known for its rural intervention programs where it conducts workshops at village level on various subjects related to disability to equip rural caregivers with knowledge and information.